NFTs Before They Were Cool

... early projects which have been resurfacing in the wake of the recent NFT tidal wave. You might even be surprised how far back some of these date!

With all of the old school Ethereum prototype NFTs coming back in style we thought we’d cover some of the especially early projects which have been resurfacing in the wake of the recent NFT tidal wave. You might even be surprised how far back some of these date!

Very cool stuff! I really wish I heard of Etheria back when it launched. I searched around a bit and found there are some pretty funny property names in Etheria. I found Mount ‘Vitalik Buterin’ pretty quickly.

I also found a little place called ‘Your Mom’s House’. Really :)

One of our own RLE Gazette developers AlexxShadow is also the developer of Etheria Exchange. He was kind enough to give me a bit of his input regarding all the recent excitement.

It’s been a significant discovery for the NFT community. A lot of people stumbled across this project at the same time last weekend. It’s been good that the OG Cyrus has involved himself with the community that has sprung up around the exchange, and it’s been incredible for me to see as a relative newcomer to the scene. Amazing how quickly such a talented bunch of developers can come together to resurrect such an old project and make it accessible to the current market.

Participants should be sure to note the difference between Etheria Exchange 1.1 and 1.2.

Also note the difference between Interfaced Etheria V1.1 and V1.2. (One of the V1.2 entries is marked for removal from OpenSea)

Might be too late for me to find a nice place in Etheria. October 2015 was a long time ago now. This project really did have a significant head start on the other Pre-NFTs reviewed this week, and all of it’s creators and community certainly deserve credit.

Not that you need me to tell you, but well done! Etheria is awesome!

As best we can tell, the next NFT project launched was Curio Cards, over a year and a half later!

That’s right! Curio Cards actually did launch about a month before CryptoPunks.

Check out the Curio Cards contract. As you can see, the original release of Curio Cards predated the ERC-721 NFT standard we know today. Only after ‘wrapping’ Curio Cards in an even more modern NFT token standard, ERC-1155, could they be traded on marketplaces like Opensea.

There is some pretty fun stuff here! The brand knock offs remind me of Wacky Packages :)

Curio Card's was an online art show for digital artists and collectors. It created a new form of digital artwork ownership, one without artist fees or restrictive platform DRM, using a distributed network called Ethereum.

Curio was the first Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplace for artists on mainnet Ethereum. With it you could own a rare and collectible piece of digital artwork.

The Curio art show ran in 2017 with 30 different artists. The original cards still work and are transferable.

Bad Dogs! They’re chasing MoonCats!

That’s right, MoonCats. Which have grown fast in popularity over the past weeks since being rediscovered. This project dates back to only about a month after CryptoPunks. Here you can see the Mooncats Contract Creation.

People are excited about this one! I do wonder though, can there be be too many cat NFTs? If so, then in all fairness, MoonCats were here first! Dating all the way back to August of 2017, this project predated the NFT standards we enjoy today. Details about this project can be found at MoonCat Rescue. I think their About page sums it up nicely.

This project is an exploration of the ability to release tradable collectibles and record their ownership on the Ethereum blockchain. This feature of blockchain technology has been demonstrated by recent projects such as CryptoPunks. We have expanded on the idea and added a few novel, and what we think are exciting features.

• Mining off the chain - An off chain algorithm, the MD5 checksum of which is stored in the contract, parses the catId into its unique corresponding MoonCat image.
• Procedural generation - There are over 4 billion unique MoonCats possible. However, only 25,600 MoonCats can be added to the contract.
• Irrevocable naming - MoonCats can be named, but they can only be named once. Owners have to decide whether they want to name their MoonCat or keep it unnamed

Does this cat look happy to you?
How about we give him a bath next?
Perhaps take him for a ride in the car?

Yeah, I’m beginning to think that you can really learn a lot about a person by the kind of cat collecting they do! :)

All kidding aside, there are some neat pixel cats here. The CryptoCats team were early movers and clearly created something special. They give a special thanks to the Larva Labs team on their website worth noting.

The idea for the CryptoCats was inspired by Larva Labs. They released the 10,000 8-bit original collectible images of CryptoPunks on the Ethereum Blockchain. Look them up!

John and Matt from Larva Labs are pioneers and leading the way creating this interesting use case for Digital Collectible Art ownership using decentralized apps. Plus they are incredibly cool 8-bit artists, and super super awesome guys.

Thanks so much John & Matt!

<center>I wonder if just about all of the NFT artifacts have been discovered…</center>

See you all next week!